Is there a quest that you feel could have been executed better? If so what quest and what would you have done differently. As I mentioned before, since the TES games are single player I want more world shaping quest, like the Morrowind's personal keep/fort quest where you made your own little outpost. One quest I would have changed was the Oblivion quest where you help two sons fight off goblins on the farm. This was a fun quest with a bit of NPC scripting, but the end results were a let down. After helping defend the farm, the sons simply address you with a higher disposition greeting and their father that gave you the quest will give you a quest reward which varies depending on how many sons survive.

If both sons die I want to see the farm slowly go fallow, perhaps the father grows so bitter with grief he goes to the goblins hide out on a suicide quest. This leaves the homestead as a "house" for you.
If one son lives you see the farm maintained as you saw it, but a new grave is made beside the farm with the name of the NPC who died marked on it.
If both sons live I want to see the farm develop and expand, thus allowing you harvest more ingredients from their fields for alchemy. Perhaps a quest can come from this when they expand into the goblin's hideout.
You should always have a place to stay at the farmstead if you saved a life or two.

Well, in Oblivion, Pretty much the whole Oblivion MQ could have been executed better.
Firstly, the Oblivion Gates are too generic considering they're supposed to be one of the main locations of the game. There's only...what, 12 unique Oblivion Gates, repeated over and over again?
I also dislike how they handle you becoming a hero. You're a hero basically from the second mission, and when it gets to the mission where the 'Allies for Bruma' mission, it just doesn't work because you're going around saving every city from the Oblivion Gates. You should become a hero progressively.
There should have been more than one Elder Scrolls Council member. It would have made everything so more urgent seeming if it felt like there was a governing body that was in chaos...not just one member, wandering around the Palace aimlessly.

Oblivion: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:The_Siren%27s_Deception

What, no chance on finding out what Maelona and Gogan are planning? No chance of joining the Sirens? No chance of getting them to join the Thieves Guild even if you're the leader of it? No chance of screwing up and murdering an Anvil guard member (undercover) by accident, with all the consequences? No chance for a peaceful (or at least non-lethal) solution?

This could be a fun little mini-questchain with all of those possibilities arising from it, and maybe some more. As it is, it's one of the more mind-numbingly aggravating and insulting quests in the game.

If anything, the whole [censored] retarded intro for Oblivion. They could executed in a MUCH better format. Either:

A. (Stole idea from a mod) Drop the PC off a traveling ship in either Leyawiin, Imperial City, or Anvil. From there, the only way to get to the Main Quest is either go to jail or save Kvatah. The jail part, you get the sweet talking from Picard. The other choice involve saving Kvatch. Afterward saving that city, the PC would get a letter addressing from Jauffre that you may be some use and the Main Quest start there.

B. Rather than a freaken Jail Cell, the PC was unfortunate to get a crappy room in an Inn. Picard and his guard would barge right in and open the secret door. You should know what would happen from here.

C. You are drop off from a ship / wake up in some inn / traveling with a caravan of trader. In this intro, the PC can only get the Quest by finding a dead Blade and the Ammy.

The other quest I can think for a bit of change is giving a chance to become BFF with Dagoth Ur and see how much a bad idea this is.

I have to agree on those points.

Now, one thing I would like to see is more options in how to solve quests as a whole. One problem with the quests in Oblivion was that there was usually one one solution to them, and Morrowind wasn't much better in this respect. When you did get any sort of choice, it would rarely have any sort of real concequences. One example is the quest in the Imperial City where you're told to investigate a new store that sells items at outragiously low prices. As anyone who has completed this quest will know, the end result is that it turns out that the person owning the store was, unknowingly, selling items stolen from the dead. In the game, at the end, you were forced to kill the person behind this, what I would have liked to see was some alternatives to this. Maybe you could have been given the option to keep quiet about it in exchange for a part of the profits, or even help him with his grave robbing (Possibly leading to follow-up quests?)

There's also The quest in Cheydinhal where you must bring a corrupt guard captain who has been charging criminals outragious fines and using the money to his own ends to justice, now, this quest did in fact have options in it, you could choose to either find evidence to arrest the captain, or choose a slightly more direct solution by luring him into a trap so someone else can kill him, but as you can see, both choices involved bringing him to justice, the only difference was how you did it. Another option the game could have had was to allow you to actually help him, possibly making a deal with the guard captain to eliminate anyone who might expose his actions in exchange for a portion of the money from his corruption.

One might note that the alternate solutions I suggested for both quests involved less heroic solutions, things like betraying the original quest giver or making a deal with the villain. This is because in Oblivion, most quests seem to force you to take the heroic stance, many Dark Brotherhood quests are an exception, the Thieves Guild is a bit more gray in this regard, it really depends on whether stealing is considered always wrong no matter who you steal from, why, or what you do with the stolen items or if one regards the approach usually associated with characters like Robin Hood as heroic. As a whole, though, quests in Oblivion seemed to usually assume that the player is the heroic sort who risks his life to save others regardless of whether there's any promise of a reward or not. Which might be fine if that's the kind of character you want to play, but if you're trying to play someone who would just as soon stab you in the back and make off with anything valuable you have as help you, then you're options are much more limited. Other than that, most quests tend to end in combat no matter what you do, and I'm perfectly fine with combat in games, but combat isn't the only thing the Elder Scrolls can do, this is a game with skills like pursuasion, lockpicking, and sneaking, it can explore a lot of other potential solutions to problems that don't involve violence, so I would like to see more options for that. And I'm not saying that every problem should be possible to solve without fighting, after all, you're not going to reason with a boar or a bear, you're certainly not getting the horn off the unicorn's head without killing it first. But if the target of the quest is a reasonable person who you even get to speak to before fighting, there's really no reason why you shouldn't have the option to at least try to convince him to give up without a fight.

Also, I'd like to see the skills that a guild uses play a more important part in advancing in it, because someone who knows nothing about magic should not be able to easily advance in the Mages Guild, maybe if you had connections to important people, I could believe that your character might get into a high rank even without being the most competent person around, but your character generally does not have any pre-established relationships, the higher ranked members aren't likely to take much interest in you unless you've already shown promise. Morrowind did a better job than Oblivion in this respect, due to guilds having skill requirements, but other than an arbitrary number, there's really nothing keeping you from reaching the next. In Morrowind, rarely did the Mages Guild quests require you to actually be good at magic to complete them, I mean, you don't need to know anything about alchemy to recognize a mushroom when the game clearly labels it. Now the Fighters Guild quests required you to be able to kill enemies, but whether you did it with the actual skills the guild had on its list of requirements or with other means was entirely up to you, even the Thieves Guild often had this problem, while some tasks required you to steal items that were in areas where you could easily be spotted others involved stealing things that were well hidden from any place watched by an NPC, assuming you actually had to steal something at all. What I'd like to see is faction quests that actually require you to use the skills that faction requires to complete them, for example, some Mages Guild quests could require you to cast specific spells that would require a certain level of skill in a specific school, and using scrolls or enchantments as a substitute won't work. Thieves Guild quests should require, well, stealing. If the quests are well designed and challenging enough, the need for some skill at stealing would come naturally.

All of them. Quests are sort of weird bubbles of linearity that exist outside of an otherwise sandboxy open world game. They should concentrate less on Assigned Objective->Completion->Reward (aside from standard guild jobs, where that makes sense, and which aren't really about story anyway) and focus more on Action->Reaction. Once your choices are recognized by the game and create a little ripple effect of narrative and consequence that you own, everything you do feels like a quest.

For example, while completing quests for a guild, you could try to maximize the irritation you cause to other people, while staying within the law and your quest objectives. As a result, you would see some retaliation against your guild (and yourself) eventually; whereas a person who completed the same quest in the mildest and most inoffensive manner possible would not see any negative consequences. Or, you could complete the quest while disguising yourself as a member of a completely different guild, and bring retaliation on them instead. The consequences could build on one another: you could push two factions into more hostile relations, which would could create antagonistic jobs that would increase the hostilities even further. You could alienate an sympathetic member of the rival faction, causing him not to give you information you could have used to complete your quest in a more neutral fashion. And procedural events could also be produced by the quest system (basically, they would be quests that you don't directly participate in, to make the world feel more alive, and to let your actions have indirect impacts). For example, hardliners in the hostile faction could assassinate the most moderate member of your faction.

One suggested mechanic to help with this: Fate attribute for NPCs. Basically, sort of a meta thing that respects the idea that the game is not just a physical simulation, but also a story. As such, you don't want the Prime Minister to randomly get ganked in a barroom brawl; rather than lobotomizing your AI, you can just tell the game -- no, the PM is too important to die in a brawl. Figure something out to stop that from happening. If the player's not around, just give him immortality. If the player is around, spawn a nearby guard patrol to kick in the door and save him. When it comes to simple game mechanics, the Fate attribute is like a more nuanced Essential flag. If the PC is 100, and a main quest NPC is 90, while your typical bandit is 5, the only way that ally will die in combat with bandits is if the PC is there and personally stabs him the face (though he might be defeated and knocked out).

However, Fate is only for reining in random stuff -- not things driven by the narrative (in terms of scripted quests, and high-level questlike action/reaction mechanics). For example, if you take actions that create animosity between two factions, a normally low-fate assassin NPC might be granted the ability to kill a specific high-fate leader NPC in a minor plotline. It doesn't mean that the assassin will succeed (that depends on his skills, equipment, and luck), but it's not doomed to failure.

OB main quest

The same way helping cities got additional troops at the final battle closing gates should have lessened the resistance. Martin dying should have been an option, as the mixture of the divine and daedric blood supposedly released that giant dragon, and blood on a corpse is not hard to find.

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Planes_of_Oblivion At least the regurgitated ones. And then four constant ones not counting the realms of Boethiah and Peryite.

And speaking of Boethiah and Peryite, those are the quests I would have redone, either not entering their realms at all, or at the very least scraping together a small collection of unique architecture to do those realms a fraction of justice... instead of insensibly cloning the Deadlands.

Bring back the E3 Kvatch sequence. Sooo sweet, especially compared to what shipped.